Living & Dying in the Shadow of Russia’s Biggest Nuclear Fuel Reprocessor

Russia said this week it has no plans to shut down Mayak, the country’s biggest reprocessor of spent nuclear fuel. The plant, located just east of the Ural mountains in Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast, is considered to be the site of some of the worst radioactive contamination on earth.

Mayak was created in the 1940s as the heart of the Soviet Union’s nuclear program. But the territory around the plant is a wasteland, with generations of residents suffering from sterility, cancer, asthma, and other illnesses. RFE/RL reports on the lives — and deaths — of people who have been forced by circumstance to remain in the Tatar village of Muslim, just 30 kilometers downstream from Mayak.

..Despite growing outrage over Mayak’s past environmental transgressions, the plant continues to dump radioactive waste into the Techa River — more than 10 million cubic meters of it every year.

A trial in the case opened in late November in Chelyabinsk, the region’s main city, itself just 60 kilometers from Mayak. The Urals regional prosecutor’s office filed an inquiry into whether the general director of the plant should face criminal charges.

But government officials still view the plant more as a profitable industry center than a public liability. Mayak has taken on a new role, storing and reprocessing spent nuclear fuel brought in from abroad — a plan Moscow hopes will add billions of dollars and rubles to federal coffers.

The scheme has caused outrage among residents of Chelyabinsk Oblast. Sergei Kirienko, the newly appointed head of Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency, has acknowledged mounting concerns about Mayak’s impact on the environment.

MosNews